


Interdimensional Problems

by glorious_spoon



Category: Iron Fist (TV), Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Walk Into A Bar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24464755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: There's no rhyme or reason to the list of names. The only thing any of them have in common is that they all went to school in Hawkins, Indiana during the mid-eighties, when a series of bizarre calamities befell that small town.The same small town where Danny and Ward vanished three days ago, chasing a story about doors to another dimension.(Or, Colleen Wing and Robin Buckley meet in a bar to talk about dimensional rifts, and to stage a rescue.)
Relationships: Robin Buckley & Colleen Wing
Comments: 11
Kudos: 23
Collections: A Ficathon Goes Into A Bar





	Interdimensional Problems

**Author's Note:**

> For the Spring 2020 Into A Bar challenge:
> 
> Robin Buckley walks into a bar and meets... Colleen Wing!

The door swings open with a gust of hot air that blows through the barroom. Colleen squints, rubbing a hand over the back of her neck where loose strands of hair are still sticking to her sweat-damp skin. She can tell that the newcomer is a woman, but not much more than that, and with nothing to go on besides the stiff photo on the UC Cinema and Media Studies faculty page it’s hard to be sure if it’s the one she’s waiting for. Given how this week has gone so far, she’s not going to be that surprised if Dr. Buckley ends up standing her up and making this whole trip a waste of time.

Time she doesn’t have. Time that Danny and Ward don’t have. If they’re even still—

She turns back toward the bar, wrapping her hands around her beer bottle. It’s a surprisingly good local microbrew inexplicably named Pumpkin Death Cult, although most of the appeal right now is the cool condensation slicking the glass. Even with the window AC units chugging gamely away against the mid-August heat, it’s stuffy as hell in here.

Colleen has learned patience under much less comfortable circumstances, though. She rests her elbows on the bar as footsteps approach, and doesn’t turn until the woman slides onto the stool next to her.

“I gotta say,” the woman says after a moment. “You’re not quite what I was expecting. Robin Buckley. You must be Ms. Wing.”

“Colleen,” Colleen says, turning toward her. She looks younger than in the unflattering staff photo: early fifties, maybe, but she wears it well. Her light brown hair is streaked with gray and pulled back in a careless braid; she’s wearing comfortable jeans and a UC t-shirt, a lanyard with her faculty badge still around her neck. The whole effect gives her a disarmingly absentminded academic air. Colleen is used to looking beneath the surface, though, and she doesn’t miss the sharp, thoughtful look that the woman fixes her with. “What were you expecting?”

“A reporter.”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“After a while, you develop a nose for them. Or at least the kind that are still interested in the Starcourt Massacre after all this time.” She lifts a hand to the bartender without looking away from Colleen. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

Colleen inclines her head, and finds that she’s smiling for maybe the first time in days. A brittle, uncertain kind of smile that seems like it might crack at the slightest provocation, but still a smile. “No. No, it’s not.”

“You want to know about the Upside-Down.”

“The Upside-Down,” Colleen repeats. That’s what Erica Sinclair called it, too, in the brief, impatient phone call that popped and faded over an international connection. She’s a friend of Ward’s, of all people, or at least what passes for a friend with him: the brisk and terrifyingly competent CEO of a multinational tech company, and possibly the last person on the planet that Colleen would have expected to reach out with an offer of help after Danny and Ward vanished into a rip in thin air. “Is that what it’s called?”

“That’s what the kids called it back in the eighties.” Robin Buckley laughs suddenly, a sharp, odd sound. “Kids, Jesus. We were all kids back then. Anyway, I guess the name stuck.”

The Upside-Down. An alternate dimension, whatever they called it. That was why Ward and Danny were there in the first place: trying to find the doorway back to K’un Lun. They found a doorway, all right, but as for where it went—

Well, it definitely wasn’t K’un Lun. She saw that much on the video that Danny sent her, before a black rip in reality opened up and swallowed him whole.

Colleen clears her throat, drawing calm into herself. It would be easier if she’d managed to sleep at all in the past couple of days. “What happened at Starcourt Mall in 1985 wasn’t a gas explosion. Was it.”

“Not so much.” The bartender sets a glass down in front of Robin, who takes it with a murmured thanks. “You don’t really seem that surprised about the whole…” she waves a hand illustratively. “Interdimensional bullshit.”

Colleen flexes her fingers, feels power surge in her hands along with a brief flare of light. She reels it back a moment later, watches Robin’s eyebrows lift, and says, “I’ve seen weirder. I just want to get my boyfriend and his brother back. That’s all.”

“How did you get my name, again?”

“Erica Sinclair.” The list Erica gave her of people to try contacting was baffling: a theoretical physicist who co-wrote a paper on wormholes with Dr. Jane Foster; an investigative reporter and her photojournalist husband; a former pro skateboarder; a horror novelist and a pastry chef in central Indiana; a comic book artist living with his husband in San Francisco; a guy who owns a high-end beauty salon in Chicago; Erica’s older brother Lucas, who made it big in the dot-com bubble and retired to Hawaii. And Robin Buckley, a film studies professor at UC who by all accounts lives an entirely ordinary life in a townhouse on a quiet street with her long-term partner and a couple of cats. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, no logic that Colleen can follow. The only thing any of them have in common is that they all went to school in Hawkins, Indiana during the mid-eighties, when a series of bizarre calamities befell that small town.

The same small town where Danny and Ward vanished three days ago, chasing a story about doors to another dimension.

“Erica.” Robin shakes her head. “Shoulda guessed. I guess I was the only one who actually answered the phone.”

“Yes,” Colleen says bluntly.

“Of course.” For an awful moment, Colleen is sure that she’s going to get up and walk out, that she’ll be back at square one with nothing to go on other than that cut-off video, but a moment later Robin settles into a seat and pulls her beer toward her. “Well, lucky for you, the thing about doors is that they can always be reopened. Tell me what happened, from the beginning.” She grins suddenly. “And I’ll drag the rest of them in, whether they like it or not. It’s been a little too quiet around here lately anyway.”

Colleen takes a deep breath, feeling something in her loosen for the first time in days. She takes a sip of her beer, and starts talking.


End file.
